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Gotta be honest, the new front-page interface is going to take a little while to get used to. It seems more image based (as opposed to text based). Still, it does look awful Purrrty and I am sure I will adjust to it soon.
Are there some distinct improvements (in terms of ease of use) that have occurred? I haven't had enough free time to fully play with it.
__________________ Here's to hoping that Paizo's 3.75 will allow me to avoid 4e for as long as possible...
I like the faster loading times. I don't like the slider bars around the stories on the front page. They seem unnecessary and really add visual clutter.
I love all the new nifty features, like tags and the wiki. This stuff is like candy to me.
__________________ Adventure is not outside; it is within. --Found in a fortune cookie on game night
Strangely I think I'd be okay with having a PC die by a bear exploding out of his head. --Awayfarer, after having his PC put a furry ball from a Bag of Tricks into his mouth.
I guess Im the only that does NOT like the the new front page. I used to like just clicking on my shortcut and BAM there is all the latest text in news all there in my face. Now I my eyes just glaze over at all the prudict reviews and other stuff that I have no interest in whatsoever in my face. I dont expect it to change and I guess I'll have to find a different site for my 4th edition news....
To be quite honest? I preffered EN1. I like the speed, I like the multiquote option, now that I've gotten the hang of it. The avatars for supporters and staff are nicely done, if that's considered part of the shift. The rest? I have no need or desire for blogs and wikis, I liked actually having a formatting/smily/etc... interface, cause I have trouble remembering the text codes for them. In fact, I preferred the design of the old smilies. The wink looks like a pirate now, what the heck? And I liked the old maniacal laughter one.
These are minor things, and while i prefferred 1, 2 is certainly still a very good site, and I suppose if I had more use for the new features I'd be ecstatic about them.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, it's probably just me, but I don't like the Fork thread option. It just looks unsightly on a main forum page to see so many "Forked" titles in large print, and i don't see the need for it at all. I never had a problem copying an address, going to the appropriate forum, and pasting it in my new thread.
My online gaming group, Torch of Spirit (Contains all information for the current game I'm co-DMing as well as lots of houserules I'm using or considering for the future. Feel free to check it out.)
I used to like just clicking on my shortcut and BAM there is all the latest text in news all there in my face. Now I my eyes just glaze over at all the prudict reviews and other stuff that I have no interest in whatsoever in my face. I dont expect it to change and I guess I'll have to find a different site for my 4th edition news....
My thoughts as well. All the little windows that I have to use to scroll to see if the news within is interesting are getting annoying as hell.
If there's any chance of changing back or having a more "text based" display, then please consider it. All these windows are just far too annoying.
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Kropp g'drak mahr ak g'raar thokka u da Gruumsh! Battle with brute strength and relentless vigor in the name of Gruumsh!
Kor - Orc Scrollkeeper of ORCS
Orc Roleplaying Community Site www.orcs.ca
My thoughts as well. All the little windows that I have to use to scroll to see if the news within is interesting are getting annoying as hell.
If there's any chance of changing back or having a more "text based" display, then please consider it. All these windows are just far too annoying.
I've recently adjusted the CSS so that now only Internet Explorer has scroll bars. Other browsers have auto-adjusting heights on the boxes. Internet Explorer doesn't fully display the images if the div height isn't explicitly set, yet another example of its thousands of violations of the CSS 2.1 specification.
The advert interface is a lot better. In the past, once you'd created the ad it would simply blast away at full speed until it had exhausted all your impressions. If you were the only person advertising, then you could blow a million impressions in a few days, which is pretty pointless. Also, you couldn't turn advertisments on and off, so you had to keep deleting them and then re-creating them.
Now you can set a number of impressions you want them the advert to show, and the date range within which you want them shown. And you can toggle the advert on and off.
Speaking of which, animated gifs should be working now. And btw - I have other feature ideas for that section - one of the first is figuring out a means to have an ad evenly distribute over the course of it's run. That is if you buy 1000 impressions and want it to run 10 days the system will make sure only 100 ads run per day.
Faster. Actually, it is much faster and generally more responsive.
The forum posting interface is better.
Now the negatives:
I cannot spend much time on the site at the moment due to the white text on black issue. I need my papyrus mode (or black text on white) back so that I can use the site without getting a headache.
The front page needs work. It is crowded and the importance of text has been relegated. I used to read the front page every day. Now I skip it and go straight to the forums.
Frontpage:
I like the look of the icons, but I miss the wealth of info/links on the front page. I don't really have time to drill down into each of the article/icons. I would prefer being able to read through the info and then select what to follow-up on.
Forums:
I do think that the form improvements are mighty, mighty slick!
__________________ Here's to hoping that Paizo's 3.75 will allow me to avoid 4e for as long as possible...
Last edited by iwarrior-poet; 9th July 2008 at 03:19 PM..
Hmm... I may have spoken too soon. The elimination of the myriad scroll bars is a vast improvement. Now I can easily go through the whole page. Also now there is more helpful text along with the icons.
Nice Job!
__________________ Here's to hoping that Paizo's 3.75 will allow me to avoid 4e for as long as possible...
Forgot to mention, it's probably just me, but I don't like the Fork thread option. It just looks unsightly on a main forum page to see so many "Forked" titles in large print, and i don't see the need for it at all. I never had a problem copying an address, going to the appropriate forum, and pasting it in my new thread.
You may not have a problem making your own new threads, but a lot of other people do. I think the fork button is great. It encourages people to start new threads instead of derailing old ones (though we still have a little bit of that).
Speaking of the fork option, I haven't used it much myself, but does it put a post in the thread you forked from? If it doesn't do that already I think that would be a great addition (if it's simple). That way you could make sure people already in a discussion could follow your fork if they were interested in your tangent, and it would be an easy way to tell if somebody had already forked about that topic. Say a topic does go off on a tangent. I'd like to be able to fork a new thread and make it obvious to everybody in the first thread that they should go to the new one for more on that topic instead of continuing to clutter the original thread with the tangent topic.
__________________ Adventure is not outside; it is within. --Found in a fortune cookie on game night
Strangely I think I'd be okay with having a PC die by a bear exploding out of his head. --Awayfarer, after having his PC put a furry ball from a Bag of Tricks into his mouth.
Not bad so far. It looks a little early, so I'm not sure I can fairly comment, but still not bad.
The speed is good, and some of the features (forked threads, multiquote, etc) are spiffy.
Still missing a bunch of things (a useable stealth skin, options for the # of threads per page) as well as an inferior front page and worse smilies compared to ENW1, but like I said, still early.
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